IT Pro Verdict

The DS710+ is an expensive dual-drive NAS appliance but it delivers a heap of quality storage features and good speeds over Gigabit. Mirrored arrays will hit performance but the latest firmware adds a range of valuable tools and Synology comes into its own if your future includes big capacity expansion plans.

By Dave Mitchell

Published 23 April 2010 In Reviews

We had the new DX510 expansion box and were able to connect this to the main unit on the fly and as we added new drives they appeared ready for configuration. With an extra five bays up for grabs, RAID5 and dual redundant RAID6 arrays become realities and a new feature in DSM 2.3 is migration from the former to the latter.

The DS710+ has the same feature set as its larger DiskStation brethren which includes support for Windows, Linux and Macintosh clients plus local or AD authentication. As users are created you can determine their share access privileges at the group and user level whilst quotas allow you to limit how much storage each one can consume.

The new firewall feature is aimed at those that want to link the appliance securely to the internet. Synology provides its EZ-Internet wizard which guides you through configuring your broadband connection and creating port forwarding rules for inbound remote access.

The firewall supports up to 100 rules which can be applied to individual IP addresses or ranges and tweaked for specific services. These include storage services offered by the appliance so you can decide precisely which ones remote users can access.